The AI Revolution: Learning from History

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Dr. Jon Finn explores striking parallels between the Industrial Revolution and today's AI Revolution, highlighting the unprecedented competition to human brainpower that AI represents. Unlike the Industrial Revolution that unfolded over a century, the AI Revolution is happening in just 2-5 years, with predictions being realized faster than expected.

• First-time ever competition to human brainpower through neural networks that can work 24/7
• Industrial Revolution created jobs while the AI Revolution is eliminating them even in financially strong companies
• Henry Bessemer's steel-making technology that reduced production time from 4 days to 15 minutes serves as a historical parallel
• Approximately 100,000 tech sector jobs lost to AI this year already
• Companies are reallocating savings from human roles into building AI workforces
• Understanding history, particularly the Industrial Revolution, helps us prepare for AI changes
• Optimizing our brain states is key to becoming "AI winners" rather than being displaced

You're only ever one Brain State habit away from transformation.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello Habit Mechanics .
It's Dr John Finn here.
Hope you're having a great weekso far.
Today I want to talk about theIndustrial Revolution and what
we can learn from the IndustrialRevolution.
As we get deeper into the AIRevolution, there is, as you
might expect, some, I suppose,what I would call AI denial

(00:28):
narratives saying that thistechnology is not all that good
and it won't make the changesthat people are predicting.
Looking at the tech, looking atthe impact it has when people
use it, well, I just cannotagree with those narratives.
They don't make any sense.
When you look at this from afirst principle perspective,

(00:50):
what we have for the first timeever is a is competition to
human brain power.
We've never had that before.
We have a technology that'sdesigned to work like our brains
, to run on neural networks, andtherefore it can do things that
up until months, sometimesweeks ago, depending on what
tech you're using only humanbrains could do, and it's

(01:13):
getting smarter and clevererevery day.
It doesn't have a limited umpower capacity like our brains,
in the sense of our brains needto shut down every sort of
24-hour cycle, if you like.
You need to get that good seven, eight, nine, sometimes 10
hours or more sleep to reallyrecharge the brain battery.

(01:34):
The AI neural networks can berunning 24 7.
So the tech is real and it isgoing to make a massive impact.
I've just no doubt about that.
And last week I was spendingsome time in London and I popped
into the National PortraitGallery and I was looking

(01:55):
actually at the section in thePortrait Gallery which shows the
scientists, the industrialists,the industrialists, the
inventors that essentially drovethe industrial revolution in
England and Scotland and GreatBritain.
And there's some strikingparallels between what happened

(02:29):
in the industrial revolution andwhat is happening now.
The difference is it'shappening now at a speed that I
don't think anyone was evenpredicting six months ago, but
the industrial revolutionprobably happened over um a
hundred year period.
If you sort of look at the therise of the technology, I'm sure
someone will disagree with that, but for me that's broadly how

(02:50):
it looks, how it seems to bealso growing up in a.
I grew up in a industrialrevolution town and I kind of
I've kind of seen the history ofmy own town over the period of
time, how it changed, but notwith my own eyes, but learning

(03:11):
about the history of the place.
But then if we look at the AIrevolution.
It's going to happen maybe overa period of two, three, four,
five years, and some of thethings they were predicting
would happen in five years timehave already happened.
So there were some predictionsabout at the start of the month,

(03:32):
of start of the year 2025, thatthe things that might be
happening in five years, they'realready happening.
That's how quickly this isgoing.
But there's a couple of thingsthat I thought were really
interesting.
Um, and maybe I won't mentionthem all in this pod, but there

(03:54):
were some economic observationsI was reading about from Adam
Smith about why the IndustrialRevolution would work from an
efficiency perspective, and youcan certainly extrapolate those
insights directly into whatwe're seeing with agentic AI.
There was, I think, somethingthat I found really interesting

(04:22):
and I'm going to start to crossover to the US now because I've
also been consuming some thingsaround around the US industrial
revolution is that there was aif you're in the UK, you know
Sheffield is the steel city andthere was a famous Sheffield

(04:49):
inventor called Henry Bessemer,and Henry Bessemer worked out
how to cure steel if that's theright phrase to basically make
steel faster, and he wasemployed then by Carnegie right

(05:09):
in Pittsburgh to apologies ifI'm getting my geography wrong
here.
I think it was Pittsburgh tomake.
Help him to make steel railwaylines faster, and basically
Bessemer's technology that hecreated could make a steel

(05:37):
railway line that normally tooka team of men four days to make.
His system could make it in 15minutes.
15 minutes that's exactly whatwe're seeing now, but we're
seeing it for cognitiveperformance and the difference

(05:58):
is when you can start makingrailway lines so quickly, you're
going to create more jobsbecause now railway technologies
are scalable and they're moreaffordable.
So we're going to need morepeople laying the railway lines.
We're going to need more peoplecreating trains.

(06:18):
There'll be more passengers onthe trains right, and commerce
increases all this kind of stuff.
So the industrial revolutionwas a job generator.
The same is not true with AI.
It will create some differentjobs, but those jobs will be
replacing or those jobs will notreplace the number of jobs that

(06:41):
AI replaces, if that makessense and we're already seeing
this, and this morning I readjust an article on a technology
website just timelining joblosses in the tech sector in the
states, and I think there'sabout 100 000 so far this year.
Tech jobs have gone um inrelation to ai, but it was

(07:02):
showing what businesses weredoing with those savings,
because the difference withthese job losses are is that the
businesses that are sheddingpeople are not under financial
pressure.
Businesses only normally losepeople when they're not
performing financially well.
The businesses that areshedding workers have some of

(07:25):
the strongest financialperformance on the planet, and
what this article is showing isis, yes, some people have been
replaced because AI can automatetheir jobs, fully automate
their jobs, so all the tasksthey were previously paid to do,
ai can now automate them.
But they've also and thatcreates a big saving when you

(07:51):
replace human roles with AI andwhat they're doing is they're
reinvesting that saving into anAI workforce, if you like to put
it in very simple language,which massively undersells what
those people are doing.
But there is this shift goingon and it's not always very

(08:12):
clear to see, because not everybusiness is publicizing what
they're doing.
Um, but yeah, if you'reinterested in the ai revolution,
how it's going to unfold, whyit's happening, I think you know
history is our greatest teacherand the industrial revolution
is so well documented.

(08:32):
I'd encourage you to revisitelements of that.
There are some great figureswho played major parts in that
revolution.
So there's lots of interestingthings to get into.
But again, we're not here tokind of scare anybody.

(08:57):
We just want to help people todo better.
And the first step to helpingpeople to do better is we need
to realize that this is not fakenews.
It's real.
It's not the millennium bug.
It's going to radically changehow we work and how we live.
But if we learn how to optimizeour brain states, then we will
become AI winners and we'll beable to help others do the same.

(09:21):
And that's why we always sayyou're only ever one brain state
away.
Or, let me say that again,that's why we always say you're
only ever one brain state.
Habit that's the word I wasmissing habit away.